Rethinking Freemium: One Human, One Free Sign-up
The leak in freemium
Free trials are meant to be an invitation.A way for people to try what you built without risk, with the hope they might stay.
But somewhere between the sign-up page and your usage dashboard, things get messy. The same individual creates new accounts again and again. Bots slip in. What looks like healthy growth on paper hides something else: the same user chasing another round of free credits.
At first, you shrug. A little leakage, nothing major. It seems harmless, yeah. But when you look closer, you start to wonder. If one user can take ten trials, how many of your “new sign-ups” are actually new at all?
In short, every duplicate trial feels harmless… until you look at the bill.
The cost of “Free”
Behind every free sign-up is the spent of infrastructure that costs real money. For instance, AI applications in particular do not run on goodwill. They run on GPUs. Yes, every inference request, every query, every storage operation consumes compute.
In 2024, Datadog’s State of Cloud Costs report showed average GPU cloud spending up almost 40%. Renting a single Nvidia H100 chip in the cloud can cost up to $65,000 per year, while buying one lands in the $30,000–$40,000 range.
This isn’t a calculation on paper; it’s real money. Even companies at the very top of the AI race admit it.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged that the company is losing money on its Pro subscriptions, despite charging $200 a month.
If that’s the case at the paid tier, what happens when you hand out free compute like candy?
Every duplicate trial. Every repeat account. Every bot.
This is why the cost of freemium cannot be just seen as a marketing expense. It feels like a resource sink.
The fixes teams try
So companies decide to fight back by adding barriers.
Captchas. SMS checks. Email verification.
At the start, it looks like you have solved the puzzle, but when you go deep and investigate, the reality is much different. Here’s what actually happens:
Captchas slow bots… a bit. But they also waste time. The average person spends around 10 seconds solving one, and you can pay as little as $0.50 per 1,000 CAPTCHAs that any solver can crack.
That adds up quickly if your system gets hammered thousands of times a day. And even after spending that money, you still have no guarantee it is one human, one trial.
SMS checks? Not cheap. Twilio charges $0.05 per successful verification plus $0.0083 per SMS in the U.S. RingCaptcha cites around $0.015 per SMS.
Fraud like SMS pumping can cost businesses thousands, or even millions, when attackers exploit verification systems.
Email verification adds friction too. BriteVerify charges $0.008 per email check at scale.And what does it prove? Only that an inbox exists. A single human can spin up dozens.
But the cost isn’t the real problem here. You see, even after spending extra bucks, none of this ensures that one person isn’t creating ten different accounts. Sybil attackers still find their way in, using multiple accounts to drain “free” again and again.
What to do then?
Many companies try another alternative: credit cards.“Want a free trial? Add your card first.”
It works. Abuse drops. But so do conversions. Many genuine users walk away at that step, unwilling to share financial details just to try something out.
So you’re stuck choosing between two bad options:
- Leave the door wide open and pay for the abuse.
- Or slam it shut and lose real users.
But maybe the question itself is wrong.
A simpler question
What if the gate didn’t ask for something you have (an email, a number, a card) but something you are?
Not your name. Not your passport. Not your credit card.
Just one question:Are you a real, unique human?
Fifteen seconds. A quick face scan. Enough to prove two things: that the user is alive, and that they haven’t been scanned before.
All that happens in a private and secure way. No raw biometric data leaves the device, nothing to trace back to the user identity. Just one human = one account = one free trial.
The company never handles sensitive data. The user never gives up control.Both sides move forward with certainty: this is a real human, and only one.
It changes the question from “how do we stop abuse?” to “how do we welcome real people?”
Case study: Storacha
The idea isn’t just theory. It’s already running in the wild with successful use cases.
Take Storacha, for example. They offer decentralized storage through Bluesky. Like many projects, they wanted a way to give people a free tier without opening the floodgates.
Instead of card checks or heavy KYC, they integrated Humanode’s OAuth 2.0 at sign-up. A quick, private scan, and done: one human, one free account.
The result is straightforward. One person equals one freemium account. Users have the opportunity to try Storacha’s service without handing over sensitive details. Storacha saves resources and keeps its dashboard filled with real, unique people.
A tiny tweak in the flow, but a big shift in balance.
Rethinking “Free”
Free sign-ups will always carry risk. But risk does not have to mean waste. The real question is not how to stop abuse. It is how to make “free” matter again.
When every account maps to a real, unique person, your numbers tell the truth. Your resources go to people, not patterns. Your funnel reflects curiosity, not noise.
Free does not have to mean “for anyone, endlessly, forever.”
It can mean “for every real human, once.”
And that single shift changes the whole equation.
How to try it yourself
For projects that are interested in trying, the path is simple.
Humanode offers OAuth 2.0 integration, which plugs into the same place you would normally add Google, Facebook, or Twitter sign-on.
The user verifies once with a private face scan, and your system receives proof of uniqueness. No biometric data is ever shared with you or anyone else, not even with the Humanode team itself. Read How Humanode keeps biometric verification private: https://blog.humanode.io/data-privacy-and-security-with-humanode-what-you-need-to-know/
If you want to see how it works in practice, you can explore the Storacha example
Or reach out directly to the Humanode team @ https://humanode.io
Documentation for OAuth 2.0 and SDKs are available at https://link.humanode.io/docs/oauth2-service